Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Woman discovers life after AIDS virus diagnosis

Theresa King: Living With Aids

Justin M. Bowen

56-year-old Theresa King, who has lived with the AIDS virus since 1986, takes it all in after seeing her new apartment Wednesday, April 13, 2011. Aid for AIDS of Nevada (AFAN) is providing housing for King right above the AFAN offices and her doctors.

Theresa King: Living With AIDS

Theresa King, 56-year-old who has lived with the AIDS virus since 1986 explores her new apartment for the first time Wednesday, April 13, 2011.  Aid for AIDS of Nevada (AFAN) is providing housing for King right above the AFAN offices and her doctors. Launch slideshow »

After Theresa King learned she was HIV positive, she took her 15-year-old son to Palm Mortuary. It was 1995, and she assumed she wouldn’t live to see the new millennium. At 40, King knew nothing about HIV or AIDS except that they killed people — usually gay men — so it was time to pick out a casket, secure a grave site and get her will in order.

“Your mom is fixing to die,” she told her son.

At first, they cried together. Then, her son, the eldest of four children, assured his mother that she wasn’t going to die. The teenager had learned about HIV in his health class, and he knew there were drugs out there to help. He encouraged her to go to the doctor. When they went, King sat in the corner and wept, still unable to accept her diagnosis. Her son talked specifics with the doctor. “He talked like a little man,” she recalls.

The little man was right. King didn’t die. She’s still living — with AIDS.

•••

In the 1980s, tens of thousands of Americans were infected and died of AIDS. Activist groups were formed to pressure the medical community to find a cause and cure, resulting in drugs such as AZT that help slow the disease’s progression. Awareness campaigns were launched to teach people that the disease affected people of all genders, sexual preferences, ages and ethnicities.

Today, fewer Americans are dying of AIDS, and although that’s good news, it has created a Catch-22 for nonprofit groups that assist the infected and affected.

“Death is the easy part. It is living that’s difficult,” says Jennifer Morss, executive director of AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada). “It’s great that people are living longer, but that just means we need to do more.”

Living requires regular doctor visits, paying for life-lengthening medication, dealing with discrimination, finding out if you qualify for disability and jumping through the necessary hoops to get it. Then there’s coping with the mental strain of living with the disease. The naive assume AIDS patients simply take their extra-strength vitamins and live normal lives, but their day-to-day realities are anything but easy. And no one knows this better than AFAN, which has helped individuals with all these things since 1984.

Nearly 30 years later, patients are still dealing with the stigma of the disease.

“Discrimination is just less obvious. We’ve pushed it underground,” Morss says. AFAN constantly hears stories of its clients sitting for hours in waiting rooms, watching others come and go, because many labs have policies that phlebotomists can skip patients they’re not comfortable drawing blood from.

Sick days often become issues as well. “I can get a cold and just take one or two days off work, and I’m fine,” Morss says. “One of our clients … might be out a whole week — or a month.”

Then there’s the issue of mental health. Few diseases take as massive a psychic toll as AIDS.

“I have slept for months before,” says King, who admits she’s attempted suicide since receiving her diagnosis. “I used to constantly take baths. I’d be in the tub three or four times a day, until my skin started cracking … I felt so nasty.”

Even after 15 years with the disease, King visits a counselor every week and a psychiatrist at least once every three months. Through these AFAN services, she finds solace, something she was unable to get at church. She’s seen firsthand congregations turn their backs on people with AIDS. “They’ll say it’s OK for you to attend, but not want you to participate anymore. They don’t want you to touch them. So, I don’t do church anymore.”

JeKeissa Mosley, King’s case manager at AFAN, says this is a consistent issue in minority communities — and with the elderly. AIDS rates for older demographics are on the rise.

“I remember speaking to a group of older people and thinking, ‘This is my grandma, and I have to ask her about her risk factors like anal sex.’ It is strange.”

The elderly aren’t the only group nonprofit organizations such as AFAN are seeing more of. Also growing are the number of heterosexual women and children with AIDS.

AFAN operates with 22 employees and serves 3,500 Southern Nevadans. Morss says 40 new clients arrive each month — mostly individuals who were self-sustaining for years but now need assistance because of lost jobs or financial circumstances. In the mid-1980s, when AFAN was founded, a gain of 40 clients came with a loss of 40 clients. But with lower mortality rates for AIDS patients, case managers such as Mosley are taking on new clients without losing old ones.

Earl Shelton, AFAN special projects manager, remembers when he began working in the AIDS-assistance industry 13 years ago. An on-staff psychiatrist helped the organization’s employees deal with the consistent loss of their clients. “We don’t have that anymore because more people are living,” he says.

•••

King, 56, thinks she was exposed to AIDS in 1986. On April 13, she explored her new apartment for the first time. AFAN is providing housing for King right above its and her doctors’ offices.

The apartment is one of 10 acquired by AFAN for long-term housing — 20 additional units will be available in a separate building in the same area near University Medical Center. King is one of two occupants selected.

Even before stepping foot in the apartment, King has christened it “the penthouse.” She won’t move in until the end of the month, but she’s packed and repacked her things. She decided that the china once reserved for Christmas dinners and special occasions will be the norm. “Only my Sunday best is going into the penthouse,” she squeals.

The new apartment will get her out of her two-story town house, which presented problems during the winter, when her rheumatoid arthritis flares up and makes it difficult to move. “There was a time when I thought I was going to die,” she recalls. “I couldn’t get downstairs to my medication. I could have called someone to come over, but I couldn’t get downstairs to open the door.”

King won’t have to worry about transportation to the doctor, previously an issue because she no longer drives. She’ll be closer to her therapy and to the people at AFAN, whom she considers closer than her family. King has been with the organization for more than a decade. When Morss first began working there, it was King, as an outreach volunteer, who trained her.

“I’ve seen Theresa at her lowest of lows, and now at maybe the happiest she’s ever been in her life,” Mosley says.

Standing in the hallway between the fancy bowl sink and the hookups where a washer and dryer will go — luxuries she’s never had — King breaks into tears of happiness.

•••

AFAN is funded through federal grants and private donations.

“Grants are still written like people have a week to live,” Morss says. “It raises these questions, like, ‘How do you give someone a bus pass for 30 years?’ A lot of policy needs to be reassessed — what is ‘need,’ what is ‘critical need,’ who is medically qualified?”

Simply being HIV positive doesn’t qualify you for medical disability or for AFAN services. If you can’t pay rent because you blew your last paycheck gambling, AFAN won’t help. If you can’t pay rent because you missed two weeks of work because of medical treatment, AFAN will.

Sometimes assessments are easy, but more often than not, AFAN finds itself in a world of gray.

Of every dollar donated to AFAN, 91 cents goes directly to helping clients. Numbers like that keep high-profile donors such as Penn & Teller coming back, and the magicians matched dollar-for-dollar every donation to their AIDS Walk team this year. Yet, even the smallest of donations gets respect from Morss.

“We take what we do very seriously. You have to ask yourself, ‘How hard did someone work washing cars in 100-degree weather just to be able to donate this $20 to us?’ ”

And perhaps just as important, the AIDS Walk serves as a reminder that AIDS is still as pressing an issue as ever. “I cry every year,” Morss says. “It can be a thankless job, and seeing 8,000 people come up that hill, it’s beautiful.”

The full version of this story appears in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly, a sister publication of the Sun.

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